Helen Mort

Helen Mort lives in Cambridge. She has published two pamphlets with tall-lighthouse press, the latest of which is a Poetry Book Society Choice for Spring 2010. Her latest chapbook ‘Parallax’ has just been released by Forest Publications.

A word for dark

In Spanish, there’s no word
for dark, so what is this
I move through, walking
as if sinking, down past
the white stone pharmacy,
a farmhouse where a dog
barks endlessly: he hears
the valley lob his echo back
and each time, he replies,
imagining a mate cut off
by sombre hills, just as I
might dream the mountain
starred with olive trees
and there between them
someone breathing
to the same time signature
who creeps as I do through
a nameless element, dissolving
on the night’s black tongue.